Japanese is a language spoken by approximately 125 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. As the de facto official language of Japan, Japanese is a member of the Japonic language family. Interestingly, debate over the language's origin continues; some believe the Japonic language family can be traced to the Altaic language family which includes Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic families, while others believe the Japonic language is a pure branch of its own. The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts derived from modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana. Although Japanese is written using Chinese characters (kanji), and has historically imported many words of Chinese origin -- the kanji and the original Chinese character have the same meaning -- the two languages are not considered to have a genealogical relationship.